With the recent hype surrounding Times New Viking and Wavves I thought I'd give them a listen... I couldn't get through much of it, because it sounds SO AWFUL. I'm not usually one to write off bands because of poor recording techniques - early Guided By Voices and early Mountain Goats sound pretty bad, but 1) they sound no way near as bad as Times New Viking or Wavves and 2) they were poor artists just trying to get their music out before the days of decent affordable home recording techniques. It's not very hard/expensive these days to record stuff at home to a pretty decent quality. So why are these new bands deliberately making stuff that sounds like this? It just seems like they are deliberately sabotaging their own music for some strange reason...